3

I HAVE JUST read this journal from the beginning. I find I can read the speed-writing quite easily, even the bit I did by moonlight last night. I am surprised to see how much I have written; with stories even a page can take me hours, but the truth seems to flow out as fast as I can get it down. But words are very inadequate – anyway, my words are. Could anyone reading them picture our kitchen by firelight, or Belmotte Tower rising towards the moon-silvered clouds, or Stephen managing to look both noble and humble? (It was most unfair of me to say he looks a fraction daft.) When I read a book, I put in all the imagination I can, so that it is almost like writing the book as well as reading it – or rather, it is like living it. It makes reading so much more exciting, but I don’t suppose many people try to do it.

I am writing in the attic this afternoon because Topaz and Rose are so very conversational in the kitchen; they have unearthed a packet of green dye – it dates from when I was an elf in the school play – and are going to dip some old dresses. I don’t intend to let myself become the kind of author who can only work in seclusion – after all, Jane Austen wrote in the sitting-room and merely covered up her work when a visitor called (though I bet she thought a thing or two) – but I am not quite Jane Austen yet and there are limits to what I can stand. And I want to tackle the description of the castle in peace. It is extremely cold up here, but I am wearing my coat and my wool gloves, which have gradually become mittens all but one thumb; and Ab, our beautiful pale ginger cat, is keeping my stomach warm – I am leaning over him to write on the top of the cistern. His real name is Abelard, to go with Heloïse (I need hardly say that Topaz christened them), but he seldom gets called by it. He has a reasonably pleasant nature but not a gushing one; this is a rare favour I am receiving from him this afternoon. Today I shall start with:

HOW WE CAME TO THE CASTLE

While Father was in jail, we lived in a London boarding-house, Mother not having fancied settling down again next to the fence-leaping neighbour. When they let Father out, he decided to buy a house in the country. I think we must have been rather well-off in those days as Jacob Wrestling had sold wonderfully well for such an unusual book and Father’s lecturing had earned much more than the sales. And Mother had an income of her own.

Father chose Suffolk as a suitable county so we stayed at the King’s Crypt hotel and drove out house-hunting every day – we had a car then; Father and Mother at the front, Rose, Thomas and I at the back. It was all great fun because Father was in a splendid mood – goodness knows he didn’t seem to have any iron in his soul then. But he certainly had a prejudice against all neighbours; we saw lots of nice houses in villages, but he wouldn’t even consider them.

It was late autumn, very gentle and golden. I loved the quiet-coloured fields of stubble and the hazy water meadows. Rose doesn’t like the flat country but I always did – flat country seems to give the sky such a chance. One evening when there was a lovely sunset, we got lost. Mother had the map and kept saying the country was upside down – and when she got it the right way up, the names on the map were upside down. Rose and I laughed a lot about it; we liked being lost. And Father was perfectly patient with Mother about the map.

All of a sudden we saw a high, round tower in the distance, on a little hill. Father instantly decided that we must explore it, though Mother wasn’t enthusiastic. It was difficult to find because the little roads twisted and woods and villages kept hiding it from us, but every few minutes we caught a glimpse of it and Father and Rose and I got very excited. Mother kept saying that Thomas would be up too late; he was asleep, wobbling about between Rose and me.

At last we came to a neglected signpost with TO BELMOTTE AND THE CASTLE ONLY on it, pointing down a narrow, overgrown lane. Father turned in it at once and we crawled along with the brambles clawing at the car as if trying to hold it back – I remember thinking of the Prince fighting his way through the wood to the Sleeping Beauty. The hedges were so high and the lane turned so often that we could only see a few yards ahead of us; Mother kept saying we ought to back out before we got stuck and that the castle was probably miles away. Then suddenly we drove out into the open and there it was – but not the lonely tower on a hill we had been searching for; what we saw was quite a large castle, built on level ground. Father gave a shout and the next minute we were out of the car and staring in amazement.

How strange and beautiful it looked in the late afternoon light! I can still recapture that first glimpse – see the sheer grey stone walls and towers against the pale yellow sky, the reflected castle stretching towards us on the brimming moat, the floating patches of emerald-green water-weed. No breath of wind ruffled the looking-glass water, no sound of any kind came to us. Our excited voices only made the castle seem more silent.

Father pointed out the gatehouse – it had two round towers joined halfway up by a room with stone-mullioned windows. To the right of the gatehouse nothing remained but crumbling ruins, but on the left a stretch of high, battlemented walls joined it to a round corner tower. A bridge crossed the moat to the great nail-studded oak doors under the windows of the gatehouse room, and a little door cut in one of the big doors stood slightly ajar – the minute Father noticed this, he was off towards it. Mother said vague things about trespassing and tried to stop us following him, but in the end she let us go, while she stayed behind with Thomas, who woke and wept a little.

How well I remember that run through the stillness, the smell of wet stone and wet weeds as we crossed the bridge, the moment of excitement before we stepped in at the little door! Once through, we were in the cool dimness of the gatehouse passage. That was where I first felt the castle – it is the place where one is most conscious of the great weight of stone above and around one. I was too young to know much of history and the past, for me the castle was one in a fairy tale; and the queer heavy coldness was so spell-like that I clutched Rose hard. Together we ran through to the daylight; then stopped dead.

On our left, instead of the grey walls and towers we had been expecting, was a long house of whitewashed plaster and herring-boned brick, veined by weather-bleached wood. It had all sorts of odd little lattice windows, bright gold from the sunset, and the attic gable looked as if it might fall forward at any minute. This belonged to a different kind of fairy tale – it was just my idea of a ‘Hansel and Gretel’ house and for a second I feared a witch inside had stolen Father. Then I saw him trying to get in at the kitchen door. He came running back through the overgrown courtyard garden, calling that there was a small window open near the front door that he could put Rose through to let us in. I was glad he said Rose and not me – I would have been terrified to be alone in the house for a second. Rose was never frightened of anything; she was trying to scramble up to the window even before Father got there to lift her. Through she went and we heard her struggling with heavy bolts. Then she flung the door open triumphantly.

The square hall was dark and cold and had a horrid mouldy smell. Every bit of woodwork was a drab ginger colour, painted to imitate the graining of wood.

‘Would you believe anyone could do that to fine old panelling?’ exploded Father. We followed him into a room on the left, which had a dark red wallpaper and a large black-leaded fireplace. There was a nice little window looking on to the garden, but I thought it was a hideous room.

‘False ceiling,’ said Father, stretching up to tap it. ‘Oh, lord, I suppose the Victorians did their worst to the whole place.’

We went back to the hall and then into the large room which is now our drawing-room; it stretches the whole depth of the house. Rose and I ran across and knelt on the wide window-seat, and Father opened the heavy mullioned windows so that we could look down and see ourselves in the moat. Then he pointed out how thick the wall was and explained about the Stuart house having been built on to the ruins of the castle.

‘It must have been beautiful once – and could be again,’ he said, staring across to the field of stubble. ‘Think of this view in summer, with a wheat field reaching right up to the edge of the moat.’

Then he turned and exclaimed in horror at the wallpaper – he said it looked like giant squashed frogs. It certainly did, and there was a monstrosity of a fireplace surrounded by tobacco-coloured tiles. But the diamond-paned windows overlooking the garden and full of the sunset were beautiful, and I was already in love with the moat.

While Rose and I were waving to our reflections, Father went off through the short passage to the kitchen – we suddenly heard him shouting, ‘The swine, the swine!’ Just for an instant I thought he had found pigs, but it turned out to be his continued opinion of the people who had spoilt the house. The kitchen was really dreadful. It had been partitioned to make several rooms – hens had been kept in one of them; there was a great sagging false ceiling, the staircase and the cupboards were grained ginger like the hall. What upset me most was a bundle of rags and straw where tramps must have slept. I kept as far away from it as possible and was glad when Father led the way upstairs.

The bedrooms were as spoilt as the downstairs rooms – false ceilings, horrid fireplaces, awful wallpapers. But I was very much fetched when I saw the round tower opening into the room which is now Rose’s and mine. Father tried to get the door to it open, but it was nailed up so he strode on across the landing.

‘That corner tower we saw from outside must be somewhere about here,’ he said. We followed him into Thomas’s little room, hunting for it, and then into the bathroom. It had a huge bath with a wide mahogany surround, and two mahogany-seated lavatories, side by side, with one lid to cover them both. The pottery parts showed views of Windsor Castle and when you pulled the plug the bottom of Windsor Castle fell out. Just above them was a text left by the previous tenants, saying: ‘Hold thou me up, and I shall be safe.’ Father sat down on the side of the bath and roared with laughter. He would never have anything in the bathroom changed so even the text is still there.

The corner tower was between the bath and the lavatories. There was no door to it and we started to climb up the circular stone staircase inside, but the steps had crumbled so much that we had to turn back. But we did get high enough to find a way out on to the top of the walls; there was quite a wide walk with a battlemented parapet on each side. From there we could see Mother in the car, nursing Thomas.

‘Don’t attract her attention,’ said Father, ‘or she’ll think we’re going to break our necks.’

The walls led us to one of the gatehouse towers; and inside it, opening on to the staircase, was the door to the gatehouse room.

‘Thank the Lord this isn’t spoilt,’ said Father as we went in. ‘How I could work in this room!’

There were stone-mullioned windows looking into the courtyard, as well as the ones at the front overlooking the lane. Father said they were Tudor; later in period than the gatehouse itself, but much earlier than the house.

We went back into the tower and found the steps of the circular stone staircase good enough for us to go up higher – once we were crawling into the darkness I wished they hadn’t been; Father struck matches but there was a dreadful black moment each time one burnt out. And the cold, rough stone felt so strange to my hands and bare knees. But when at last we came out on the battlemented top of the tower it was worth it all – I had never felt so high in my life. And I was so triumphant at having been brave enough to come up. Not that I had had any choice; Rose had kept butting me from behind.

We stood looking down on the lane and over the fields stretching far on either side; we were so high that we could see how the hedges cut them up into a patchwork pattern. There were a few little woods and, a mile or so to the left, a tiny village. We moved round the tower to look across the courtyard garden – and then we all shouted: ‘There it is!’ at the same moment. Beyond the ruined walls on the west side of the courtyard was a small hill and on the top of it was the high tower we had driven so long in search of. It puzzles me now why we hadn’t seen it when we first came through the gatehouse passage. Perhaps the overgrown garden obstructed the view; or perhaps we were too much astonished at seeing the house to look in the opposite direction.

Father dived for the staircase. I cried, ‘Wait, wait!’ and he turned and picked me up, letting Rose go ahead striking the matches. He guessed the bottom of the staircase must come out in the gatehouse passage, but Rose used the last match as we reached the archway on to the walls; so we went back along them to the bathroom and down the nice little front staircase of the house into the hall. Mother was just coming through the front door to look for us, dragging a cross, sleepy Thomas – he never liked to be left alone in the car. Father showed her the tower on the hill – we could see it easily once we knew where to look – and told her to come along; then dashed across the courtyard garden. She said she couldn’t manage it with Thomas. I remember feeling I ought to stay with her, but I didn’t. I raced after Father and Rose.

We climbed over the ruined walls which bounded the garden and crossed the moat by the shaky bridge at the south-west corner; that brought us to the foot of the hill – but Father told us it was ancient earthworks and not a natural hill (ever since then we have called it the mound). The turf was short and smooth and there were no more ruins. At the top we had to scramble over some ridges which Father said must have been the outer defences. This brought us to a broad, grassy plateau. At the far end was a smaller mound, round in shape and very smooth, and rising from this was the tower, sixty feet tall, black against the last flush of sunset. The entrance was about fifteen feet up, at the top of an outside flight of stone steps – Father did his best to force the door but had no luck; so we didn’t see inside the tower that night.

We walked all round the little mound and Father told us that it was called a motte and that the wide grassy plateau was a bailey; he said all this part was much older than the moated castle below. The sunset faded and a wind got up and everything began to look frightening, but Father went on talking most happily and excitedly. Suddenly Rose said: ‘It’s like the tower in The Lancashire Witches where Mother Demdike lived.’ She had read bits of that book aloud to me until I got so frightened that Mother stopped her. Just then we heard Mother calling from below; her voice sounded high and strange, almost despairing. I grabbed Rose’s hand and said: ‘Come on, Mother’s frightened.’ And I told myself I was running to help Mother; but I was really terrified of being near the tower any longer.

Father said we had all better go. We climbed the ridges and then Rose and I took hands and ran down the smooth slope – faster and faster, so that I thought we should fall. All the time we were running I felt extremely frightened, but I enjoyed it. The whole evening was like that.

When we got back to the house, Mother was sitting on the front door-step nursing Thomas, who had fallen asleep again.

‘Isn’t it wonderful?’ cried Father. ‘I’ll have it if it takes my last penny.’

Mother said: ‘If it’s to be my cross, I suppose God will give me the strength to bear it.’ Father laughed at that and I felt rather shocked. I don’t in the least know if she meant to be funny – but then, I realize more and more how vague she has become for me. Even when I remember things she said, I can’t recall the sound of her voice. And though I can still see the shape of her that day huddled on the steps, her back view when we were in the car, her crown tweed suit and squashy felt hat, I can’t visualize her face at all. When I try to, I just see the photograph I have of her.

Rose and I went back to the car with her, but Father wandered round until it was dark. I remember seeing him come out on the castle walls near the gatehouse – and marvelling that I had been up there myself. Even in the dusk I could see his gold hair and splendid profile. He was spare in those days, but broad – always a large person.

He was so excited that he started to drive back to King’s Crypt at a terrific pace – Rose, Thomas and I simply bounced about at the back of the car. Mother said it wasn’t safe with the roads so narrow and he slowed down to a snail’s pace which made Rose and me laugh a lot. Mother said: ‘There’s reason in everything and Thomas ought to be in bed.’ Thomas suddenly sat up and said: ‘Dear me, yes, I ought,’ which made even Mother laugh.

The next day, after making enquiries, Father went over to Scoatney Hall. When he got back he told us that Mr Cotton wouldn’t sell the castle, but had let him have a forty years’ lease on it.

‘And I can do anything I like to the house,’ he added, ‘because the old gentlemen agrees I couldn’t possibly make it any worse.’

Of course, he made it very much better – whitewashing it, unearthing the drawing-room panelling from beneath eight coats of wallpaper, pulling out the worst fireplaces, the false ceilings, the partitions in the kitchen. There were many more things he meant to do, particularly as regards comfort – I know Mother wanted some central heating and a machine to make electric light; but he spent so much on antique furniture even before work at the castle began that she persuaded him to cut things down to a minimum. There was always a vague idea that the useful things were to come later; probably when he wrote his next book.

It was spring when we moved in. I particularly remember the afternoon we first got the drawing-room straight. Everything was so fresh – the flowered chintz curtains, the beautiful shining old furniture, the white panelling – it had had to be painted because it was in such a poor condition. I was fascinated by a great jar of young green beach leaves; I sat on the floor staring at them while Rose played her piece ‘To a Water Lily’ on Mother’s old grand piano. Suddenly Father came in, in a very exulting mood, to tell us that there was a surprise for us outside the window. He flung the mullioned windows open wide and there on the moat were two swans, sailing sedately. We leaned out to feed them with bread and all the time the spring air blew in and stirred the beech leaves. Then I went into the garden, where the lawns had been cut and the flowerbeds tidied; there were a lot of early wallflowers which smelt very sweet. Father was arranging his books up in the gatehouse room. He called down:

‘Isn’t this a lovely home for you?’

I agreed that it was; and I still think so. But anyone who could enjoy the winter here would find the North Pole stuffy.

How strange memory is! When I close my eyes, I see three different castles – one in the sunset light of that first evening, one all fresh and clean as in our early days here, one as it is now. The last picture is very sad because all our good furniture has gone – the dining-room hasn’t so much as a carpet; not that we have missed that room much – it was the first one we saw that night we explored the house and was always too far from the kitchen. The drawing-room has a few chairs still and, thank goodness, no one will ever buy the piano because it is so big and old. But the pretty chintz curtains are faded and everything has a neglected look. When the spring comes we must really try to freshen up our home a little – at least we can still have beech leaves.

We have been poor for five years now; after Mother died, I fear we lived on the capital of the money she left. Not that I ever worried about such things at the time because I always felt sure Father would make money again sooner or later. Mother brought us up to believe that he was a genius and that geniuses mustn’t be hurried.

What is the matter with him? And what does he do all the time? I wrote yesterday that he does nothing but read detective novels, but that was just a silly generalization, because Miss Marcy can seldom let him have more than two a week (although he will read the same ones again and again after a certain lapse of time, which seems to me amazing). Of course he reads other books, too. All our valuable ones have been sold (and how I have missed them!) but there are a good many of the others left, including an old, incomplete Encyclopaedia Britannica; I know he reads that – he plays some kind of a game following up cross-references in it. And I am sure he thinks very hard. Several times when he hasn’t answered my knock on the gatehouse room door I have gone in and found him staring into space. In the good weather he walks a lot, but he hasn’t now for months. He has dropped all his London friends. The only friend he has ever made down here is the Vicar, who is the nicest man imaginable; a bachelor, with an elderly housekeeper. Now I come to think of it, Father has dodged seeing even him this winter.

Father’s unsociability has made it hard for any of us to get to know people here – and there aren’t many to know. The village is tiny: just the church, the vicarage, the little school, the inn, one shop (which is also the post office) and a huddle of cottages; though the Vicar gets quite a congregation from the surrounding hamlets and farms. It is a very pretty village and has the unlikely name of Godsend, a corruption of Godys End, after the Norman knight, Etienne de Godys, who built Belmotte Castle. Our castle – I mean the moated one, on to which our house is built – is called Godsend, too; it was built by a later de Godys.

No one really knows the origin of the name ‘Belmotte’ – the whole mound, as well as the tower on it, is called that. At a guess one would say the ‘Bel’ is from the French, but the Vicar believes in a theory that it is from Bel the sun god, whose worship was introduced by the Phoenicians, and that the mount was raised so that Midsummer Eve votive fires could be lit there; he thinks the Normans simply made use of it. Father doesn’t believe in the god Bel theory and says the mound is a very good place to worship both sun and stars from. I do a little worshipping there myself when I get time.

I meant to copy an essay on castles I wrote for the school History Society into this journal, but I find it is very long and horridly overwritten (how the school must have suffered!), so I shall paraphrase it briefly:

CASTLES

In early Norman times, there seem to have been mounds with ditches and wooden stockades as defences. Inside the defences were wooden buildings, and sometimes there was a high earthen motte to serve as a look-out place. The later Normans began building great square stone towers (called keeps), but it was found possible to mine the corners of these – mining was just digging then, of course, not the use of explosives – so they took to building round towers, of which Belmotte is one. Later, the towerkeeps were surrounded with high walls, called curtain walls. These were often built in quadrangle form with jutting towers at the gatehouse, the corners and in the middle of each side so that the defenders could see any besiegers who were trying to mine or scale the walls, and fight them off. But the besiegers had plenty of other good tricks, notably a weapon called a trébuchet which could sling great rocks – or a dead horse – over your curtain walls, causing much embarrassment. Eventually, someone thought of putting moats round curtain walls. Of course, the moated castles had to be on level ground; Belmotte tower-keep, up on its mound, must have been very much of a back number when Godsend Castle was built. And then all castles gradually became back numbers and Cromwell’s Roundheads battered two and a half sides of our curtain walls down.

Long before that, the de Godys name had died out and the two castles had passed to the Cottons of Scoatney, through a daughter. The house built on the ruins was their dowerhouse for a time, then it became just a farm-house. And now it isn’t even that; merely the home of the ruined Mortmains.

Oh, what are we to do for money? Surely there is enough intelligence among us to earn some, or marry some – Rose, that is; for I would approach matrimony as cheerfully as I would the tomb and I cannot feel that I should give satisfaction. But how is Rose to meet anyone? We used to go to London every year to stay with Father’s aunt, who has a house in Chelsea with a lily-pond and collects artists. Father met Topaz there – Aunt Millicent never forgave him for marrying her, so now we don’t get asked any more; this is bitter because it means we meet no men at all, not even artists. Oh, me! I am feeling low in spirits. While I have been writing I have lived in the past, the light of it has been all around me – first the golden light of autumn, then the silver light of spring and then the strange light, grey but exciting, in which I see the historic past. But now I have come back to earth and rain is beating on the attic window, an icy draught is blowing up the staircase and Ab has gone downstairs and left my stomach cold.

Heavens, how it is coming down! The rain is like a diagonal veil across Belmotte. Rain or shine, Belmotte always looks lovely. I wish it were Midsummer Eve and I were lighting my votive fire on the mound.

There is a bubbling noise in the cistern which means that Stephen is pumping. Oh, joyous thought, tonight is my bath night! And if Stephen is in, it must be teatime. I shall go down and be very kind to everyone. Noble deeds and hot baths are the best cures for depression.